Five Ways to Take Care of Your Body (Aside from Diet and Exercise)

I am more than ready for the weekend! Today is my rest day and I plan to use every moment of it to let my body rest and recover. This has been a great week workout wise and I feel like my body and I have finally comes to terms with what is working for me. At least right now.

Thank you so much for all your amazing comments on yesterday’s post! It was so exciting for me to type and I was almost in disbelief that I was actually able to hit “send.”

Today I wanted to focus on a topic that has been on my mind a lot lately.

We all know the basics of taking care of ourselves: eat right and exercise. Whether you are trying to lose weight or just stay healthy we all know those are the two basic things you read just about everywhere you go.

I wanted to look at Five Ways to Take Care of Your Body (Asides for Diet and Exercise).

In my opinion there are so many other aspects to being healthy and taking care of yourself and I wanted to draw attention to to those today.

1. Love

This can go in so many ways. Love those around you, love yourself, and love your life. There are so many different aspects of love and they are all so important.

The greatest gift in this world is love. The love of family, the love of friends, and the love you have for yourself. When you love yourself and accept yourself that is the only time you can really take care of yourself. You only have one life and one body – so take care of it!

2. Sleep

I have gotten better at this, but it is still a work in progress.

Sleep does amazing things for the body. It allows your body to reset and repair itself. It allows you to let go over everything that the day has brought and release.

A lack of sleep can cause many issues to the body as well such as: sickness, loss of concentration, impairs judgements, and makes it overall harder to function.

Bottom line – GET YOUR SLEEP!

3. Listen to Pain

Please take my advice on this one: listen to your body and listen to pain. There are some pains that are normal and are just from every day things, but you have to learn what is normal and not normal for your body.

When you feel pain that is your body’s way of telling you something isn’t right. Whenever you feel pain take time to listen and figure out what it is. Don’t just try to push through it.

4. Slow Down

We are often so busy that we forget the most basic thing: to slow down.

We have things to do, people to see, places to be, we have so much we need to get “checked off the list” each day that we don’t even stop to really look around.

The famous quote from Ferris Bueller says it all:

“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around every once in a while you may miss it.”

5. Meditate/Relax

You need to find some way to relax your mind and body each day outside of exercise. When I am running it is the time during the day where I usually can just let myself go. I don’t have to worry about anything and it is a time with just me, myself and I. I love it but I have also found that finding another moment during the day to relax is important.

In the mornings or right before bed I try to find a time to just be by myself. It doesn’t have to be for very long, even just 2-3 minutes, but it allows me to get my mind reset and relaxed.

Mental health is so important and we should make time to make sure we are in the right mental state just like we do making sure we are in the right physical state each day.

Wes and I will typically also disconnect from everything and spend at least an hour every night just relaxing together.

This were some pictures from Wednesday night where we spent our time watching college basketball and relaxing.

This helps me wind down, disconnect from my computer, and relax before going to bed.

Love is important and as you say it isn’t just ‘being in love’ (though that pretty well rocks). It is shown that while having negative thoughts is normal and natural, falling into a cycle of negativity can actually impact neural impulse communications with the brain, which can impact sleep, memory, emotions and immunity!

I would only change one thing “Listen to your body”. Sure there is pain, but in many ways that tends to link back to exercise. Your body tells you many things – pain is one, but there are many other ‘functions’ that happen naturally some for everyone and some gender-specific, and how those occur can tell us something.

For example, I know people who always have a pill at the ready – have an ache? Advil. Lunch not sitting well? Tums. Other things? Pepto, Midol, Immodium, and on and on. Maybe instead take note of how your diet impacts you – as athletes we get hyped up on what we are SUPPOSED to eat/drink, but is it what our bodies want? Listen to the signals and find out – my wife ignored the early stages of her nut allergy until last year it really started becoming an issue!

Agree – Listen to your body. That can vary for every person. I had that written down at first but decided to change it because I always so that. You are the one who knows your body the best and that is what is vital – you have to know when your body is sending you signs to slow down or take it easy!

Love can go in so many directions and the past year I have seen just how important it is – In all areas! Love is so much more than being “in love” it is about loving yourself, loving people through the good and the bad, and helping others.

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